On December 7 - 8 2017, the 2nd China Pharma IP Summit was held in Shanghai. The Summit attracted a total of over 370 participants from more than 130 pharmaceutical companies as well as experts, scholars and attorneys in the field of Pharma IP from all over the world to discuss hot and frontier issues in the above field.

On the First Day of the Summit, John D. Conway, the Senior Vice President of Sanofi and the global head of the IP Department, shared the IP strategy for pharmaceutical companies as well as the team's global management experience combined with his own practice. Mr. John D. Conway pointed out that for the IP management of pharmaceutical companies, business goals and patent purposes should be clearly defined, and a global patent team should be established. Enterprises should need special intellectual property "architects" to design the global IP strategy in an all round way, and convene expert attorneys to "build" the strategic framework of IP rights as well as coordinate the formulation and implementation of the entire IP strategy.

ZHANG Qing kui, the Director of the Special Committee of Pharma IP Research under the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association, made interpretation on pharmaceutical patent linkage, protection period compensation for drug patent as well as drug data protection combined with the progress of the pharmaceutical policy reform, expounded the possible positive and negative influences these policies might have on the pharmaceutical industry, made multi-angle analysis on the existing objections and suggested looking at problems with a long-term and dialectical view.

Alyson L. Wooten, the Senior Attorney of Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP made a speech on the issue of due diligence in patent acquisition based on her own practical experiences. She held that issues that need attention for due diligence in the process of drug patent acquisition include the protection degree of the claims for the drug patent, the validity, enforceability and ownership of the patent, etc. In addition, the inventor's proprietary technique as well as other key employee's knowledge, license and other contents of the agreement as well as whether the key patent has litigation challenge are also noteworthy factors.

CHEN Zhefeng, a Senior Patent Attorney and Litigation Attorney of the Chemical Dept. of Shanghai Patent & Trademark Law Office, LLC analyzed the success rate of invalidation requests against different types of patents, the common invalidation grounds as well as types of evidence based on a case study of an invalidation request filed by a well-known domestic pharmaceutical company against 9 patents.

On the Second Day of the Summit, Head of the Biotechnology/Pure and Applied Organic Chemistry Department of the European Patent Office, two partners from the German firm BOEHMERT & BOEHMERT, Deputy Director of the Administrative Litigation Department No. 1 of the Patent Reexamination Board, former chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and Director of the Legal Affairs of Baiyun Mountain Pharmaceutical Factory made speeches respectively. In addition, Zhou Yunchuan, former judge of the Supreme Court and YING Xiangjian, former judge of the High Court of Zhejiang Province, introduced hot issues as well as development trend of Chinese pharmaceutical patent litigation from judicial perspective.